Elements of a Data-Driven Approach to Adaptation

Adaptation is what enables a system to respond to perturbations in its environment. Even though case-based reasoning is commonly thought of as a data-driven problem-solving paradigm, adaptation methods often follow a model-driven pattern. This paper discusses what a purely data-driven approach to adaptation might look like. The proposed method uses co-variations to extrapolate to the target case some parts of the relational structure underlying the case base. One of the outcomes of this work is to show that adaptation can be (at least partially) included in the case-based inference process, which is known to be a special case of analogical reasoning.